Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units, to service the incoming contacts. It is common for a contact center to initially assign an incoming contact to an IVR to collect personal information from the contactor, and thereafter assign the contact to be serviced to an agent having the appropriate skills based on the collected personal information. A database can be maintained by the contact center to store the collected personal information about the contactor in anticipation of future contacts by the contactor. The collected personal information can be used to avoid initial assignment to an IVR and effect direct assignment of the contact to an agent, thereby increasing contact center efficiency and promoting customer satisfaction.
The use of an IVR, however, to initially collect information from a contactor is in widespread use. Navigating through an IVR menu structure can be a frustrating experience for contacts, causing a higher incidence of dropped calls and higher levels of customer dissatisfaction. For example, airlines and government agencies typically offer services in multiple languages. It can be time consuming and even annoying to call such a service and have to listen through a list of languages before hearing your own and finally being able to select it. This is especially the case given that the initial greeting is in one default language. In another example, many voice mail servers cater to multiple differing languages by forcing each caller to listen to the same message in the differing languages before the caller can record a message of his or her own.
It is desirable for a contactee to know certain personal information about a contactor as early in the contact as possible to service better the contactor.